VMware's Heartbeat Offers High Availability for vCenter Server

VMware is looking to offer high availability for its VMware vCenter Server with its new Heartbeat product. The VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat tool protects against downtime issues by designing a solution that replicates server configuration and data onto a passive server. Heartbeat is one of several announcements that VMware is making at its VMworld Europe 2009 conference.

VMware
is looking to bring new high-availability capabilities to its vCenter Server
with a new product called Heartbeat, which is designed to protect the vCenter
Server against unexpected downtime.

The
VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat was just one of many announcements the x86
virtualization company made at its VMworld Europe 2009 conference. In a
much-publicized move, CEO and President Paul
Maritz used the event to offer a road map of VMware's future in cloud
computing.

The vCenter Server Heartbeat solution continually monitors
the VMware vCenter Server, including its database and service components, to
protect the system against a whole range of failures, errors and
downtime-causing events. It also provides replication and failover of the
vCenter Server to either another server within the data center or else to an
off-site data center, using a LAN or WAN (wide area network), respectively.
The replication and failover is hardware-agnostic.

Available in March, the VMware vCenter Server Heart will retail for $9,995 per
VMware vCenter Server, if purchased separately from the VMware vCenter Server
license. If purchased in a bundle with the VMware VCenter Server license, the
final cost will be $12,995.

"Ninety-four percent of surveyed VMware customers
report that they run applications in production on the VMware platform,"
said Raghu Raghuram, vice president of VMware's server business unit, in a
statement. "Now more than ever, customers require resiliency for their
virtualization management infrastructure."

VMware has licensed vCenter Server Heartbeat from partner
Neverfail, which creates products designed to minimize data and productivity
loss in the event of server downtime. Its core product, the Neverfail
Continuous Availability Suite, replicates data from active to passive server to
ensure continuity and data protection.

Nicholas Kolakowski is a staff editor at eWEEK, covering Microsoft and other companies in the enterprise space, as well as evolving technology such as tablet PCs. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, Playboy, WebMD, AARP the Magazine, AutoWeek, Washington City Paper, Trader Monthly, and Private Air. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.